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The emerging demand for cost-effective, easily accessible, and rapid prototyping electronics fabrication calls for novel techniques to design and manufacture electronic components and devices for wearable functional sensing, on-skin medical monitoring, and body-worn energy conversion. Inspired by daily hand-writing, innovative and ubiquitously available pens can be employed to write conductive patterns on multiple substrates; such a low-cost, fast, and user-friendly direct writing paradigm has recently aroused remarkable research interest as a promising electronics prototyping strategy. In this review, state-of-art advances in techniques for direct writing of electronics are presented, and pros and cons of each fabrication route are discussed. Emerging applications of pen-based writing electronics are also summarized. Based on these, final conclusions, limitations and challenges, as well as ongoing perspectives are illustrated.

The identification and quantification of chemicals play a vital role in evaluation and surveillance of environmental health and safety. However, current techniques usually depend on costly equipment, professional staff, and/or essential infrastructure, limiting their accessibility. In this work, we develop paper-based capacitive sensors (PCSs) that allow simple, rapid identification and quantification of various chemicals from microliter size samples with the aid of a handheld multimeter. PCSs are low-cost parallel-plate capacitors (~$0.01 per sensor) assembled from layers of aluminum foil and filter paper via double-sided tape. The developed PCSs can identify different kinds of fluids (e.g., organic chemicals) and quantify diverse concentrations of substances (e.g., heavy metal ions) based on differences in dielectric properties, including capacitance, frequency spectrum, and dielectric loss tangent. The PCS-based method enables chemical identification and quantification to take place much cheaply, simply, and quickly at the point-of-care (POC), holding great promise for environmental monitoring in resource-limited settings.

The integration of paper with an electrochemical device has attracted growing attention for point-of-care testing, where it is of great importance to fabricate electrodes on paper in a low-cost, easy and versatile way. In this work, we report a simple strategy for directly writing electrodes on paper using a pressure-assisted ball pen to form a paper-based electrochemical device (PED). This method is demonstrated to be capable of fabricating electrodes on paper with good electrical conductivity and electrochemical performance, holding great potential to be employed in point-of-care applications, such as in human health diagnostics and food safety detection. As examples, the PEDs fabricated using the developed method are applied for detection of glucose in artificial urine and melamine in sample solutions. Furthermore, our developed strategy is also extended to fabricate PEDs with multi-electrode arrays and write electrodes on non-planar surfaces (e.g., paper cup, human skin), indicating the potential application of our method in other fields, such as fabricating biosensors, paper electronics etc.

Trapping of microparticles finds wide applications in numerous fields. Microfluidic chips based on a dielectrophoresis (DEP) technique hold several advantages for trapping microparticles, such as fast result processing, a small amount of sample required, high spatial resolution, and high accuracy of target selection. There is an unmet need to develop DEP microfluidic chips on different substrates for different applications in a low cost, facile, and rapid way. This study develops a new facile method based on a screen-printing technique for fabrication of electrodes of DEP chips on three types of substrates (i.e. polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA), poly(ethylene terephthalate) and A4 paper). The fabricated PMMA-based DEP microfluidic chip was selected as an example and successfully used to trap and align polystyrene microparticles in a suspension and cardiac fibroblasts in a cell culture solution. The developed electrode fabrication method is compatible with different kinds of DEP substrates, which could expand the future application field of DEP microfluidic chips, including new forms of point-of care diagnostics and trapping circulating tumor cells.